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We don’t just want a captain, we expect a superman

Posted on | November 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

The captain’s job is the most important position in the team because every side has to have a leader whether it’s at school, in a club, at county or Test level.

Someone has to make the decisions on the make up of the team, what to do if winning the toss, fielding positions and changing the bowlers. Throughout the game these things are happening all the time and hardly ten minutes goes past without the skipper needing to make decisions. We expect so much of a captain that what we really need is a superman who has to be brilliant at leading men, have an acute tactical awareness and also make time for his own performance. Human nature being what it is, we’re really expecting a miracle aren’t we?

A captain is judged on the success or failure of the team, wrongly in my opinion, but that is the nature of the beast. They’re like generals; the winners get medals and the losers get the sack. Yet sometimes the captain has no real influence on the outcome of a match. Why? He may just be lucky and have a set of individual players who are far better than the opposition, like Clive Lloyd and his West Indian team of great fast bowlers and wonderful world class batsmen. Or he might be great tactically but without ammunition he is always going to struggle. At other times he might have lots of luck, like winning the toss on a poor pitch, as Andrew Strauss did at The Oval in the final Test of the last Ashes series but that’s got nothing to do with skill, it’s the luck of the draw. Also if your bowlers bowl badly or the side drops catches that’s not the captain’s fault but he’ll often get the blame.

For me the two Ashes captains, Strauss and Ricky Ponting, were not only fine batsmen but excellent leaders of men who had the respect and admiration of their players and were well-liked. Yet in my opinion they’re very ordinary tactically. For example 12.2 overs to bowl at Monty Panesar and Jimmy Anderson in Cardiff and what did Ponting do? Wasted vital overs by using Marcus North, a part time spinner, when any quality bowler worth his salt would have been queueing up to bowl at tailenders. Can you imagine what Fred Trueman or Ian Botham would have said if that had happened in their day? The air would have been blue!

Great captains are two steps ahead of the game, they have to see things before they happen. It’s an instinct, a feel for the game and a need to understand bowlers, things you can’t learn from a book or on a blackboard. In my playing career Brian Close, Ray Illingworth and Mike Brearley had these gifts. Others I have seen and admired are Michael Vaughan, Imran Khan, Saurav Ganguly and Mark Taylor. All had the ability to handle the team and could ‘play a bit’ themselves. If I could pick someone who I think would have made a terrific international captain if given the chance it would be Shane Warne. Fantastic personallity, great tactical nous but too outrageous even for the Aussies. It was no surprise to me that when he was made captain of the Rajasthan Royals he led them to the Indian Premier League title in its first year.

But the captain I admire most is England’s Douglas Jardine. I would love to have had lunch with him and discussed that famous ‘bodyline’ tour of Australia. He had to have been a man of tremendous vision to conceive the plan and execute it so efficiently. He knew he had to combat Bradman because if The Don got hundreds in each innings there wouldn’t be any chance of England winning. He talked to Arthur Carr, the Nottinghamshire captain, about Harold Larwood’s pace and accuracy and then met Harold to ask the bowler if he thought he could carry out the plan. Of the party he took to Australia there were only two dissenters, ‘Plum’ Warner, the manager, and Gubby Allen, who didn’t like it because, as Fred Trueman later said, he was neither accurate, nor quick enough to do it. Jardine may have been ruthless but the rest of the players always spoke of him with admiration and respect.

Ray Illingworth was very much in the same mould and on our tour of 1970-71 to Australia neither the manager, David Clark, nor the vice captain, Colin Cowdrey, were on the same wavelength but Raymond still got the job done and we won the Ashes.

It’s such a difficult job, probably the toughest in any sport, and we shouldn’t be surprised that only a few can lay claim to be really great captains.

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